Overlooking

Overlooking

A paper given at Witness: Memory, Representation and the Media in Question, European Summer School in Cultural Studies, Copenhagen, August 25, 2004. It has been published inWitness: Memory, Representation, and the Media in Question, ed. Ulrik Ekman and Frederik Tygstrup (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2008), pp. 291-302.

In what follows I will try to correlate the sensory and the ethical dimensions of witnessing and bearing witness. What is the sense, I may have said, of witness? Witness implies a knowing, a making known in a witting act; but also involves, as we will, see a certain innocence, an eye taken up in seeing rather than knowing. The problem for the witness of extremity, of an actuality that is unimaginable, is how to combine being and seeing.

In English, the words ‘oversee’ and ‘overlook’ have diverged in opposite directions. To oversee something is, as in the Latinate form that translates it more or less directly, to supervise it: to watch it closely as it happens (for that which one oversees, like that which one observes, is usually a process rather than an object). One wishes to avoid missing anything. Overlooking means just the opposite. To overlook means to miss something, to let something slip or pass unobserved in what one sees. Thus, one oversees in order not to overlook anything. The opposition of meanings comes into focus in the word ‘oversight’, the ordinary conversational meaning of which is a mistake made through inattention, but has accrued a bureaucratic usage which is identical with overseeing, as in ‘The Steering Committee will maintain oversight of this process’. The semantic magic seems to be performed by and on the suffix ‘over’. In the case of overseeing, the word ‘over’ seems to imply temporal intensification as well as a spatial overlayering; one hovers over the object of attention, in order to be able to look again and again if need be. In the case of overlooking, one seems to have one’s sights fixed telescopically too far ahead, so that one misses what is immediately to hand or under one’s nose (but who can see anything that is under one’s nose?). Thus, in overlooking, one underlooks.

Our condition seems to be one in which the traditional emphasis placed upon seeing, discovery, bringing to light, demonstration and related acts of witness are being compromised by the condition of over-exposure and hypervisibility. Once, we suspected that there was more in things than meets the eye, which is to say, there was always more for the eye to make out than was given to it in appearance. The eye concomitantly craved for more from a world of appearances that was secretive, deceptive, niggardly of its visible truth. Now, there is more for the eye to meet with than it could possibly ever make out. There are not only more images, there are also more opportunities of seeing them, more ways and means and occasions of visibility. Ours is no longer a world of cryptic appearance, but rather one of clamorous apparition.

The eye is often thought of as identical with the active, autonomous self. What it sees is objects, fixed by the act of seeing in a way that is not true for the other senses. For Sartre and his most influential follower, Laura Mulvey, to be subject to ‘the gaze’ of another was to be fixed and formulated, to have one’s freedom constrained or negated. We feared that, reduced to the condition of an image for another, there would be nothing left of or for ourselves. Feminism fought to rescue women from the condition of sexual objectification brought about by the phallic male eye, and Foucauldian analysis probed the workings of ‘scopic regimes’ on a range of other victims of the remorseless eye of disciplinary power.

The appropriate response to the condition of being objectified is shame, abasement, the desperate attempt to hide, to protect oneself from the scorching light of exposure.

It seems possible that the very moment at which we were becoming convinced of the appropriative powers of the eye, the regimes of looking were themselves changing (or, one might possibly say, changing back). Suddenly, slowly and suddenly, power began to pass from the subject to the object. Images and the realm of the visible began to assert, or, perhaps, remembering the history of iconoclasm, to reassert, the power of what is seen to trap, muddle and immolate the eye. How else is one to make sense of the most obvious and puzzling response to the shift in the distribution of scopic power between men and women, namely the increased desire of men to enter and inhabit the condition of image. The simple explanation for this, that women are now entering into their inheritance of scopic power, and exercising it on men in the way in which men had exercised it on them, does not begin to account for men’s newfound, – or, again, newly-rediscovered – yen to be looked at. Rather than men surrendering to women the gaze they once wielded on their own behalf, we are seeing men greedily wanting from women the power to draw, own and consume the gaze of others. The authority of the look, that simply looks upon a world that it thereby gives the status of an object, gives way to, or is complicated by the authority of the look of things – in that strange English locution that seems to give to the looked-at object something of the power of vision itself. Things passively looked at give way to the look of things, the things of the world that say to us: look on this picture, and on this. Comparing to the middle voice, between active and passive, of Greek, we now have something like the middle look.

What does this mean for the act of witness? The authority of the act of witness depends upon the innocence of the act of looking. Witnessing requires disinterest. One must see everything, one must overlook nothing. It is not that one must look ‘objectively’ or dispassionately exactly, for one must see as a witness, who is prepared to bear witness, but one must look without investment or intent in the seeing itself. One must look without looking too much, without overlooking. (A woman calls the police to complain about a neighbour who is exposing himself at his bedroom window. The policeman says that he can see nothing, at which the woman explains ‘Oh, but officer, you have to stand on a chair and use these binoculars’.) Not only are you supposed to be disinterested in order for an act of witness to take place, you are required to look once, in a single, absolute, all-encompassing shot or sweep. For you to look again, and see anything more or different than you saw at first, is to compromise your future testimony. Witness thus becomes more than usually required, and more than usually difficult, in a regime of overlooking.

Seeing and Saying

For witnessing is also articulation; it is caught in the seesaw of seeing and saying. To witness something is not just to see it, not just to be a mute ‘eye-witness’, biding your time to have your say. It also means to say what you have seen, as when one signs as witness to a legal document or procedure, or to be prepared to do so at a later stage. In order to give truthful testimony, one must say, fully and without supplementation, reservation or residue, what one saw. The act of speech must be as innocent as the act of looking or seeing. Both the act of seeing and the act of testimony must be in some sense uninsulated by reservation, unamplified by interpretation. They must constitute what many contemporary philosophers like to call ‘events’. Each must constitute a kind of radical presentness, an immediacy or absolute exposure, that we have taught ourselves to think is characteristic of trauma. The structure of this immediacy is opposite but equivalent. The witness is exposed as the victim of trauma is exposed. The model for this is not vision, as popularly and traditionally understood (vision having been thought of as an active, or projective sense rather than a passive and receptive one), but a certain mode of susceptibility. All this is assisted by the fact that, as I have suggested, one increasingly does not ‘take’ the scene one sees, but is taken by it, is taken up in it. So one might almost say that the vision of the witness has also to be that of the victim, the victim of what they witnessed, a victim in the fact of having witnessed it, as though the vision were as much a violation as a responsible act.

It is a technologised or mediated form of vision which provides the model for this mode of looking. The model is that of the witness as camera, or, better still, as photosensitive plate, in which vision is incised directly, immediately, as though through the skin and not through the eye. This conception of anthropophotosensitivity did not, however, have to wait for the invention of photography to be developed, for the belief in ‘maternal impressions’ imparted to the flesh of unborn children through the exposure of the pregnant mother to alarming sights depends upon a similar belief in the power of vision to inflict injury. The bearer of witness and testimony is sometimes represented in the terms that Lyotard employs to characterise a certain radical immediacy sought by the avant-garde artist, which allows no delay or reflection or conceptual adjustment to intervene. In giving testimony, the witness must mediate that immediacy, exposing himself or herself anew to that originary exposure, allowing nothing to deflect or muffle the truth. If one is to be a truthful witness, one has not to supervise or oversee one’s seeing, which must not be, as we might say of a falsified photograph, ‘retouched’, lest one in the process substitute a meaning for a fact, a signification for an event. One must speak truth innocently, blindly, inanely. One must speak the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but must not mean to tell the truth. One must be touched, marked, without writing, in what Lyotard has called ‘prescription':

There would not first be a surface (the whole tradition, heritage, memory) and then this stroke coming to mark it. This mark, if this is the case, will only be remark. And I know that this is how things always are, for the mind which ties times to each other and to itself, making itself the support of every inscription. No, it would rather be the flame, the enigma of flame itself. It indicates its support in destroying it. It belies its form. It escapes its resemblance with itself. (Lyotard 1991, 158)

But seeing and saying are not so easily to be distinguished, nor, for that same reason, simply correlated. The kind of seeing which we would call witnessing is different from the ordinary, more variously instrumental acts of seeing. When one witnesses, one’s saying is immanent in one’s seeing: One sees differently when one sees in order to say – one strives to see more than one would ordinarily see, to miss nothing of importance, for example. The act of witnessing – of those caught up in the atrocities of Auschwitz or Bosnia or Rwanda – is orientated towards the future act of testimony, elsewhere, at another time. The witness is deported into their later act of report. The testimony which may subsequently convert an ordinary act of seeing into an act of witness makes such innocence impossible. For in order to reconstitute the truth of what one saw (felt, heard, smelt, tasted etc) one must return, look again, revise, overlook oneself, see one’s own antecedent act of seeing in rendering it into words. In striving to fix the image in and on oneself, in order never to forget it, one nevertheless commits oneself to innumerable returns to look again at what one has looked at, at the photograph one has made of oneself. Only saying can maintain the freshness, the permanence – as it were by retouching – of what has been seen, of what one wants to insist has sufficiently and with elementary simplicity seared itself as scene.

As many have said, the act of giving testimony, especially to those extreme events which seem to exceed ordinary frames of understanding, constitutes an aporia, centred upon the incommensurability of being and seeing. The authority of eye-witness, ear-witness or even nose-witness (let us not entirely neglect this most important of modes) testimony comes from the fact that one was there, laid open to and inundated by the enormity of the events. But to be thus swallowed up is a strange and uncharacteristic way of being there. One might say that the austerely absolute form of being-there demanded of the witnesses of extremity means that, in a certain sense, they must not have been there, not present to themselves in the ordinary way. The witness derives his or her authority from the fact that they attest in their own unique persons (not only ‘I was there‘, but ‘I was there’). And yet the kind of extreme exposure without reserve to phenomena required of the witness undermines the possibility of having been there in precisely propria persona. One’s person is dissolved in the act of seeing. One becomes accessory to this act, which is, as we have seen, in reality, not an act, exactly, but a being acted upon. The demands of witnessing mean that the witnesses have to have in part forgotten, or overlooked themselves in looking, thus obviating the claim: ‘I was there’. They didn’t see at all: they were taken up in the look of what was to be seen.

There is a darker shadow to this. For absolute aperture, unconditional exposure, without second thoughts, without another look, allows one to overlook everything that clamours against the injustice of one’s survival. The survivor of horror often has to suppress or minimise the fact that the horror might have been tolerable after all, might have been survivable, except by cruel and arbitrary chance. In saying ‘I was there‘. the survivor has to defend himself or herself against the undead voices who demand ‘So what are you still doing here?’

In our era, as I began by saying, the preciousness and impossibility of seeing have been transformed by the ever-present necessity and possibility of exposure: the hypervisibility of things brings about a kind of general premonition of the visible. Thus there is the struggle to maintain the uniqueness, the incommensurability of the two events – both the event of witness and the event of testimony which both completes and yet must stand utterly apart from the event of witness. Every time a correspondent is sent to a famine area, war-zone or scene of disaster to register their responses, to see for themselves (but on our behalf, in a delegation of the act of seeing for ourselves) the screw is tightened by another turn; for the only way to preserve and proclaim the uniqueness of the events in question is to deny them any connection with or resemblance to other events. Thus the familiar formula: ‘I have seen many scenes of human suffering in my years of reporting – but never anything to compare with what I saw in Somalia/Bosnia/Cambodia.’ There can be no exchange-rate of disaster, genocide and catastrophe, even as the rhetoric of extremity and singularity builds into just such a common currency.

My Own Eyes

‘I saw it with my own eyes’ the witness may, indeed must protest. As Shoshana Felman insists

[T]estimony is not simply (as we commonly perceive it ) the observing, the recording, the remembering of an event, but an utterly unique and irreplaceable topographical position with relation to the occurrence… What does testimony mean, if it is the uniqueness of the performance of a story which is constituted by the fact that, like the oath, it cannot be carried out by anybody else? (Felman 1991, 41)

Derrida similarly has insisted on the inviolable secrecy at the heart of the most public act of testimony:

I can only testify, in the strict sense of the word, from the instant when no one can, in my place, testify to what I do. What I testify to is, at that very instant, my secret; it remains reserved for me. I must be able to keep secret precisely what I testify to; it is the condition of the testimony in a strict sense (Derrida 2000, 30)

And yet, the witness could not be a witness unless they were also prepared to lend their eyes and ears to others, and, indeed, in the first place, to lend others’ ears and eyes to themselves. The multiplication and intensification of images and representations means that this kind of overlooking, this looking at, through, and with other acts of seeing, others’ acts of seeing, has become more than ever unavoidable. We are not just individually exposed to the look of the world; we are thereby exposed to the fact of others’ acts of looking, the convergence of our angle of subtension with that of others who are caught up in, overlooked in our looking. Looking is no longer the solitary shame of Sartre’s peeper at the keyhole. Perception is interception. Thus the phenomenon of Holocaust forgeries, detailed and powerfully convincing testimonies that turn out to be, not exactly untrue, or acts of false witness, but impostures.

A particularly intriguing example of this is furnished by the photographs of American servicemen and, crucially, servicewomen, abusing Iraqi prisoners of war in the Abu Ghraib jail. It took what seemed to me a surprisingly long time for anybody to say the most obvious thing about these photos. It was Joanna Bourke who pointed out, in an article in the Guardian of May 7, that the iconography of these photographs was intriguingly like that of sado-masochism, and that their most important feature was therefore the interinvolvement of torture and pornographic display. ‘[T]he pornography of pain as shown in these images is fundamentally voyeuristic in nature. The abuse is performed for the camera. It is public, theatrical, and elaborately staged. These obscene images have a counterpart in the worst, non-consensual sadomasochistic pornography. The infliction of pain is eroticised’. <‘Torture as Pornography':http://www.guardian.co.uk/women/story/0,3604,1211261,00.html> The search engines were bombarded with requests for more salacious details about the smiling, perfectly-complexioned women featured in these pictures. It seems unthinkable that these scenarios are not being reenacted in play-dungeons and bedrooms around the world. The uncomfortable but unacknowledged truth was that we were not just looking at a kind of suffering that resembled pornography, we were looking at pornography itself. The depiction of suffering has often been employed for pornographic purposes, but here, the ‘pornalising’ of the victims played a leading part in the infliction of the suffering. Of course, no act of testimony is involved here, but only a kind of evidencing or bearing witness. But if one asks to what the photographs bear witness, then the answer must be much more complicated than ‘the inhumanity of the imperialist occupier’. Of course, this is very different from the testimony furnished of an event that is otherwise secret or unrecorded. What we have here is a representation of an event. And yet it is more than that, too. For it is a testimony that participates in the violence to which it testifies. What we look at is an act of looking, a grotesque hypertheatrical scene, in which everybody is made to be in several places at once. It is hard to know what it is that one would see with one’s own eyes here, or what one’s own eyes could be, since one would have to be seeing the act of seeing, seeing the act of witnessing constituted by the photograph. The photograph is not of, but in the scene. The photograph shows the act of taking the photograph. To see it is to see oneself seeing it through the viewfinder of the one who has taken the photograph. It cannot but implicate and incriminate anyone who sees it, or reproduces it, including those who have reproduced the images on the walls of Arab cities for propaganda purposes. It is partly for this reason that I do not allow you here the evidence of your own eyes: what you see in your mind’s eye may be the images that are more common property, collectively harboured.

The picture of the hooded man man standing precariously on a plinth, afraid to fall lest he cause the current to flow in the wires attached to his wrists is uncannily anticipated, and, in a sense, overlooked by the anonymous man in Samuel Beckett’s play Catastrophe, in which a victim is arranged by a director and his assistant, upon a plinth; the point of the play is to demonstrate the continuity between the inflicting of suffering, and the staging of that infliction. (We were told that the victim of the plinth torture never knew that there was in fact no electric current. But are we too being played with here?)

One of the puzzles about the Nazi Holocaust is the contradiction between the fact that so much care should have been taken to keep the exterminations secret, even as scrupulous records were kept, for example about operational details in the death camps. It seems at least possible that, having achieved their aim of purifying the Reich of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and other more marginal degenerates, that the Nazis would in the end have gone public. The fact that the Jews had in fact been exterminated like vermin would only have confirmed the rhetoric in which they were openly declared to be vermin in need of extermination. This would have been in accord with the Nazis’ practice, which ran rather more in favour of spectacular visibility than, say, the practice of Stalin’s regime during the 1920s and 1930s, who invented an apparatus of secrecy and doublethink so effective as to make the fate of many millions even more radically irretrievable than those of the Jewish Holocaust. It is sometimes said that one must retrieve and preserve the experiences of the murdered Jews in order that Hitler should not have succeeded in his aim of obliterating them. But perhaps the intention of the Nazis, like the memorialisers of the Holocaust, was also to make Auschwitz unforgettable, unignorable, unique and exemplary. In this respect, the effort never to forget to remember the Holocaust may not necessarily thwart, but rather make effective the Nazi purpose. It is not impossible that the making visible of the memory of the Holocaust through testimony is supervised by an unfulfilled intention of the Nazis.

Much has been said about the ordeal, the aporia, the absoluteness and the absolute impossibility of witness. What I have been saying may seem in tune with the arguments of Felman, Agemban, Derrida and others who have spoken about the extreme difficulty of testimony. Derrida in particular has spoken about the need not to resolve or evade the paradoxes of testimony, but to allow them to remain and to remain within them. In a similar way, Felman seems to insist that one allow the absolute singularity of the witnessed event and the correlative testimonial event to be disclosed. Thus, she praises Lanzman’s Shoah for not attempting to resolve its fractured perspectives into an inclusive synopsis. It is because the film goes from singular to singular, because there is no possible representation of one witness by another, that Lanzman needs us to sit through ten hours of the film to begin to witness – to begin to have a concrete sense – both of our own ignorance and the incommensurability of the occurrence. (Felman 1991, 56). Yet she also praises Lanzman for the ways in which he allows us to see and hear what his interlocutors do not themselves see and hear in their own testimony, which, if not totalising exactly, is certainly a kind of ordering of perspectives, a work performed upon the testimony, a kind of oversight exercised over what is overlooked in that testimony. The implication is that, in order to be true to events of extraordinary extremity, it is necessary to insist in their absolute incomparability, and to insist also on the absolute demands made of their observers and reporters.

But I want to move in a different direction. I want to suggest that the insistence on the absolute demands of witness and testimony is a degradation and not a sacralisation of suffering.

Murmuring uncomfortably within the word ‘overlooking’ with which I have been improvising is of course the word ‘revision’. Revising is a kind of overlooking too, and in both the senses I have distinguished: by looking again at what one thinks one has seen, one risks obliterating it, one risks overlooking it, by overwriting it Something strange has happened to the word ‘revision’ in terms of Holocaust historiography. To revise, to admit the possibility of revisability, of looking again either at new evidence, or, as becomes more and more necessary, the same evidence, is to threaten the truth or reality of the Holocaust as such. Thus, a Holocaust revisionist is the same as a Holocaust denier. But one cannot help revising the Holocaust, precisely because it so obviously does keep happening again. Only unreal things are terminal, terminable. One ought to be permitted to entertain at least the possibility that the hypervisibility of the Holocaust has helped to familiarise it rather than to ward it off, to make it, to keep it, thinkable.

In fact it is one of the conditions of the real that it be in principle subject to revision. The real is that which exceeds perceptions of it, that which can only be true so far, that which enjoins the revision of perceptions. For something to become unrevisable, incapable of being revisitable, looked at again, is for it to have become invisible, ineffable, unreal, mythical. It is the refusers of revision who deny the reality of the Holocaust.

The discomforts about witness and testimony are certainly at bottom discomforts about time and forgetting. The act of bearing witness reverses or resists the obliterating or amnesiac passage of time. We must continue to remember, we are told, lest it happen again. But keeping the Holocaust in mind has turned out to be no guarantee at all against it happening again, any more than the fact that it is supposed never to have happened before acted as any inhibition on those who effected genocide on this scale for the first time.

There may seem to be a vast, almost a definitional difference between the catastrophes of the Holocaust and that of the World Trade Center bombings. On the one hand, a systematic infliction of death and suffering, on a huge scale and in secret. On the other hand, death and suffering inflicted in a single event under conditions of maximum visibility. In one case, it seems imperative that the events never be allowed to sink into forgetfulness. In the latter case, our very implication in the events, as helpless witnesses, is part of its cruelty and horror. In the one case an obscure and fugitive reality is attested to in fugitive and diminishing remnants and survivals. In the other, a collective act of witness that is coextensive with the horror itself. Who did not see, who was not in some sense there at the World Trade Center bombings? The mediated nature of the 9/11 disaster with the prominence of mobile phone conversations in particular means that not being there was also for many a way of being on hand, in direct though mediated contact with it. Of course every story of every victim of 9/11 is unique, but there is a proliferation, an abundance of uniqueness which makes this different from other disasters. In one case, making public is a form of reparation; in the other, the publicity of the event is part of its cruelty.

And yet, there is something that holds these two catastrophes together. In both cases, onlookers begin to move into the condition of overlookers, which is to say, those who look on and look into and look with the condition of others’ observation. Those who bear witness to their perceptions and experiences, whether at a distance of decades or mere months, are necessarily surrendering the singularity of those perceptions and experiences. To make these events available to be looked at and listened to by others is inevitably to frame what one saw with one’s own eyes with the eyes and the acts of seeing of others. Something will be lost in the process, one will have to overlook much of the experience – of helplessness, incredulity, suffering – in order to make it visible to, and therefore through, the eyes of others. For, after all, the only real way to have been there might have been to have died with the others – hence the frequently-attested sensation of survivors of being ghosts or revenants, living on in an afterlife that is somehow less real and more shameful than the deaths of those who did not survive. The only one to bear witness is to continue to live, which is inevitably to start to forget, to revise, to overlook, to leave behind the singularity of the event.

It is the effort to do justice to the Holocaust and the other terrors and disasters for which, despite all the protestations of its uniqueness, it provides a model, which governs the desire to insist on its uniqueness, on their many uniquenesses. For it to be allowed to become just an event in history, like any other, is to debase it. But there is another kind of debasement, the debasement of extremity into the occasion for routine reflections on incommensurability, absolute singularity, and all the other all-too-congenial components of our contemporary jargon of authenticity. Neither the events nor the acts which witness them are singular, entire, absolute, unthinkable, or ineffable. To make the Holocaust – and all the massacres and atrocities that are its substitutes and complements – interesting, to put them to work as limit-cases of intriguing problems of representation, is degradation indeed.

Remember to Forget

Fleur Rothschild has pointed out to me that, among the mitzvot contained in the Torah, there is a special, but rather difficult duty enjoined of Jews with respect to Amalek, the leader who foully attacked the Israelites fleeing from Egypt, slaughtering the women and children who were in the rear. On the Shabbat before Purim, known as the Shabbat Zachor (Sabbath of Remembering), three verses from Deuteronomy are read, which require Jews to remember the iniquity of Amalek, in order to ensure the obliteration of his memory.

17. Remember what Amalek did unto thee by the way as ye came forth out of Egypt;
18. How he met thee by the way, and smote the hindmost of thee, all that were feeble behind thee, when thou wast faint and weary; and he feared not God.
19. Therefore it shall be, when the LORD thy God hath given thee rest from all thine enemies round about, in the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee for an inheritance to possess it, that thou shalt blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven; thou shalt not forget.
(Deuteronomy, 25, 17-19)

The fiercest and most aggressive readings of this passage split its single, paradoxically two-sided, or two-minded injunction into two separate, contradictory ones. God will exterminate the memory of the oppressor; meanwhile it is the duty of Jews to remember to carry out God’s injunction. Amalek, whose name has been kept alive by being used as an epithet for many other subsequent persecutors of the Jews (Pilate, Hitler, Arafat), must be exterminated, for, as one particularly violent website has it, ‘whoever spares “Amalek” at the expense of Israel must bear the fierce wrath of the Holy One of Israel’ <http://www.ortzion.org/Amalek.html>

But the punishment ordained for Amalek is not death but oblivion. So important is it that he be forgotten that one must never forget to remember him, that is – to remember to forget him. One does not remember and forget: one remembers to forget, takes care to forget, calls Amalek to mind in order to dismiss him from mind. One does not simply overlook Amalek, one sees him off: or, to borrow a phrase from Samuel Beckett’s Ill Seen Il Said, ‘sees him to death’. When eventually one forgets to call Amalek to mind, will the mishnah have been overlooked or fulfilled? Remembering to forget, looking to overlook, may be in the end a higher and more austere task than that of never omitting to remember.